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    • Approaches

    Safety Assessment

    Deep Blue has a wide experience in conducting safety assessments in Air Traffic Management and other safety critical domains, including railway transport and nuclear power plants. Our approach is compliant with the relevant European standards for Air Traffic Management and aeronautical systems, such as ESARR 4 (European Safety Regulatory Requirements). Furthermore the methods we apply maximise the integration of knowledge coming from people with different backgrounds inside organisations, including operational, technical and safety experts. For this purpose our strategy is that of mixing formal descriptions and narrative accounts of the system under analysis, providing methods to translate and integrate the two languages. Depending on the system under analysis, on its stage of development and on the specific operational context, we tailor our methods to support safety critical organisations in addressing the following objectives:

    • To timely identify all relevant hazards pertaining to the system under analysis and assess the risk associated to them;
    • To provide an adequate experience feedback to the concerned operational levels, ensuring that hazards are well understood with the collaboration of both technical experts and operational people;
    • To identify the appropriate mitigation means and allow their translation in specific safety objectives and safety requirements;
    • To maintain a record of why decisions are taken and to ensure that further changes do not invalidate the assessment or do not lead to unnecessarily repeating it;
    • To support the hand-over of safety responsibilities from one individual or organisation to another;
    • To support the organisation in demonstrating to second and third parties (including the regulator) that the system aims at having a safety level where risk is expected to be reduced to an acceptable level once the system is in operation.

    When we deal with Air Traffic Management, our approach is instantiated in the methodological phases defined by the EUROCONTROL Safety Assessment Methodology (SAM). More specifically we cover the Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA) when the system is still being defined, the Preliminary System Safety Assessment (PSSA) when the system is under design and the System Safety Assessment (SSA) for all the other steps of the system lifecycle, including implementation, operations, maintenance and decommissioning.